We Are Stronger Together: Building Community to Face Barriers for Latin American and Underrepresented Ecologists

Diverse groups can provide creative solutions to research problems, as people from different backgrounds and points of view offer valuable input that would otherwise be lost in homogenous groups (Hong and Page 2004, Phillips et al. 2014, Gardiner 2020). Yet, Latin American and other diverse and underrepresented ecologists must deal with challenges that others do not (Nuñez et al. 2021, Arenas-Castro et al. 2024). Some of these challenges include, but are not limited to, language barriers (e.g., Ramírez-Castañeda 2020, Amano et al. 2023, Cao et al. 2024), barriers for female-identifying ecologists (see also Martínez-Blancas et al. 2022), fear of safety and accessibility in the field and the outdoors (see also Ramírez-Castañeda et al. 2022), and access to coding and other computational and institutional resources. Motivated to discuss these issues and propose practical solutions, we organized a symposium for the Ecological Society of America (ESA) Annual Meeting in 2023 titled “We are stronger together: Building community to face barriers for Latin American and underrepresented ecologists.” We broadly asked the panelists to discuss and reflect on the following: How can we support ecologists outside of North America to showcase their research, network, collaborate, and tackle the issues and inequalities they face?

The talks presented novel results or shared experiences from different organizations already engaged in building communities of diverse ecologists and underrepresented communities through tackling language barriers, women-related issues, culturally relevant teaching, outdoor activities, and citizen science in Latin America and the Caribbean. The talks contributed to the annual meeting's motto of “Ecology for all” by adding a new perspective to the discussion surrounding barriers faced by ecologists outside North America and proposing solutions derived from the experiences of our speakers and the groups they represent, as well as others emerging from discussion during the symposium.